DARK KNIGHT RISES Nets $63 Million Second Weekend

By Albert Ching, Newsarama Staff Writer July 17, 2012 01:06pm ET

Update, 7/30: The Dark Knight Rises jumped 42 percent in the box office from Friday to Saturday, according to Deadline, with the third-highest domestic total in history after 10 days behind The Avengers (No. 1) and The Dark Knight (No. 2).
This performance is described as a recovery from both Friday night competition against the 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony and audiences staying away from theaters following the fatal shooting in Aurora earlier this month.
Deadline reports an estimated $64 million second weekend for The Dark Knight Rises, leading to a $289 million domestic gross and $537 million worldwide.
Update, 7/28: Though box office receipts as a whole looks to be down this weekend, The Dark Knight Rises is poised for a second weekend at No. 1 after an $18 million Friday, according to numbers from Box Office Mojo.
This is a 76 percent drop from last Friday, and Deadline is reporting that the box office in general is looking 30 percent down from this time last year. NRG is reporting that 20 to 25 percent of the domestic moviegoing audience is hesitant to go to a theater, due to the Aurora shooting last week.
Dark Knight Rises is currently at a $243 million estimated total, with at this point makes it the third highest-grossing movie of the year, behind first-place Marvel's The Avengers and The Hunger Games. Deadline's projections have it finishing the weekend at $278m.
Update, 7/23: The Dark Knight Rises opened with a $160.9 million three-day total, according to industry tracking sites including Box Office Mojo.
That number — the third-highest opening weekend in history and the highest for a 2D film — puts it slightly above its Christopher Nolan-directed predecessor The Dark Knight (which opened at $158.4 million in 2008), and short of both 2011's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 ($169.2m) and this year's Marvel's The Avengers ($207.4m).
Adjusting for inflation, The Dark Knight Rises had the sixth-highest opening according to Boxoffice.com, which puts it below The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.
It's clear that last Friday's deadly shooting in Aurora, CO had an effect on the film's box office performance, but to what extent is essentially impossible to determine. Combined worldwide grosses for Dark Knight Rises are currently at $248.9 million.
Update, 7/19: The early buzz on The Dark Knight Rises continues to be strong, with $25 million in ticket pre-sales to back it up.
That number comes courtesy of Deadline, who reports that the film is opening at 3,700 locations at midnight, and will 4,404 domestic theaters over the weekend. The site speculates that it might come close to the $207.4m opening weekend record set by Avengers in May, though the longer running time (fewer showings) and lack of 3D (lower ticket prices) might hurt its chances of topping the figure.
Critically, positive reviews continue to come in from outlets including the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, though the Village Voice dissented, calling the film "a shallow repository of ideas."
Original story: The Dark Knight Rises is facing major commercial and critical expectations, and appears to be meeting the latter three days before its release.
Currently, director Christopher Nolan's third and final Batman film is at an 81 Metacritic score — designated by the site as "Universal Acclaim" — which puts it just under the 82 netted by the previous entry in the trilogy, 2008's Oscar-winning The Dark Knight (though that's an average after 39 reviews, as opposed to the 12 compiled thus far for The Dark Knight Rises).
On Rotten Tomatoes, as of Tuesday afternoon the film has notched 86% positive reviews, though the few opposing takes have ignited controversy. After the first negative review appeared on the site, by critic Marshall Fine, the resulting response on the site's comment section led to a response from Rotten Tomatoes editor-in-chief Matt Atchity condeming "threats and hate speech," and the eventual temporary disabling of comments on all Dark Knight Rises reviews, positive or negative.
The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy compared The Dark Knight Rises to DC's traditional competitors, saying, the movie "makes everything in the rival Marvel universe look thoroughly silly and childish" and praising it for its incorporation of real-world concerns like terrorism and economic crisis. Richard Corliss of Time magazine was similarly taken with the movie, calling it, "a film of grand ambitions and epic achievement" and again comparing it ot Marvel's output, saying it makes this summer's massive global hit The Avengers look like "kid stuff."
Those less impressed with The Dark Knight Rises include Christy Lemire of the Associated Press, saying that "the feeling of frustration and disappointment is unshakable," and that the movie failed to meet the expectations set by The Dark Knight. Later in the review, Lemire deems the film "flat-out boring at times," targeting Nolan as being "so coldly cerebral that it’s a detriment to the film’s emotional core."
With more press screenings set in the coming days before The Dark Knight Rises opens on Friday, more reviews should be appearing soon, and look for our take on the movie — whose predecessors are both on our "Best Comic Book-Based Movies of All Time" list — very soon.
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